Anabasis-Inspired Comic

[yvnat]

They say that the most important part of writing is to show, not tale. Comics tend to do a pretty good job of that, and are much more readable than a wall of textual simulation output.

I'm planning to make a comic for this year. I will aim for ~150 pages instead of 50,000 words, because comics are naturally sparser in words than prose, but I'll also make sure to generate a 50,000 word version to please the rule pedants.

As far as I know, this has only been done once, by atduskgreg in 2014. Unlike atduskgreg's entry, I will take the strictly simulationist approach with my generator. My plan is to generate a rough page-by-page plot through a simulator, then generate individual pages a little more loosely (while still maintaining as much cohesiveness as possible, especially in the small details), and finally generate the appropriate frames to go in the pages. I am hoping to generate a story that echoes the Anabasis, though I haven't decided to what extent.

I opened a repository which is empty for now, but I hope it won't stay so for long.

[hugovk]

Sounds good!

There have been some other comic entries, see https://github.com/search?q=org%3ANaNoGenMo+comic&type=issues

The running joke/informal rule has been: a picture is worth a thousand words; 50 pictures ought to do it!

Also: dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014#70 (comment)

[yvnat]

Thank you for that, I am glad to see that it has been done before. It's a shame that so few of those were seen to completion.

[yvnat]

I finally have all the boilerplate infrastructure running. Here is a sample 6-page output: https://yvnat.github.io/NaNoGenMo-comic/pages/0/page.html

There isn't much to read at this point, because the logic that generates the comic is still very limited. The simulator can only create ""conversations"" or battles, the frames for each scene are drawn in the most minimal and deterministic way possible, and the output HTML is atrocious- but critically, there is nothing left to implement, only to flesh out.